Scientists are certain that a spent rocket fell on the Moon, but they are waiting for evidence

A SpaceX rocket that went off course last year after carrying two lunar landers to the Moon crashed into the Moon on Wednesday as predicted, scientists said.

Although no one recorded the impact – actually an 8.700 km/h impact – a telescope in Chile spotted what astronomers identified as a cloud of debris from the impact. Space experts said it was inevitable that the remaining segment of the rocket would crash onto the moon.

It's the latest example of the abundance of space debris near Earth, and many fear the problem could worsen as the US and China race to send astronauts to the moon. In 2022, a Chinese rocket accidentally crashed into the moon after a mission to it, and it's likely that many more stray rocket parts have landed on the moon in recent decades without scientists knowing about it.

SpaceX's Julianne Shaiman said this week that the company is working with NASA to avoid such incidents in the future, stressing that the latest rocket crash on the moon was not intentional. A combination of solar activity and gravity pulled the rocket onto a collision course with the moon, she said.

Carl Schmidt of Boston University said he was "100 percent certain" that his team's observations had revealed signs of that impact with the moon. The European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope detected a stream of sodium and lithium extending tens of kilometers into space for at least five to 10 minutes after the rocket hit, he added.

"We don't have images of the impact, but there is evidence from telescopes," Schmidt said in an email to the AP.

Even before a telescope in Chile spotted signs of a debris cloud, retired astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell noticed that observations of the crashed rocket's upper section, about the size of a bus and weighing four tons, on Tuesday night showed it was heading straight for the moon. The expected impact site was a dusty area near Einstein Crater on the western side of the sunlit moon—near the edge of its side visible from Earth, making it particularly difficult to observe.

"There's no doubt" that the rocket "is now in tiny, little pieces scattered across the moon near Einstein Crater," McDowell told The Associated Press.

"As a physicist, I know that what goes up must come down," he added.

Stargazers knew that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to see the cloud of dust and rocks ejected from the crater from Earth, let alone the impact flash. Spacecraft orbiting the Moon had the best chance of recording anything—or at least seeing the crater after the rocket hit.

Dutch scientist Marco Langbroek was among those who pointed his telescope at the Moon at a certain time, but saw nothing.

"We knew the chances would be slim," Langbruk said.

Like McDowell, Langbruck said there was "no doubt" that the rocket had met its end.

Visual confirmation, McDowell noted, will have to wait for NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter to fly over the crash site and send back images of the crater. The space agency doesn't expect that until next week.

The Falcon rocket's upper stage — a thick cylinder more than 12 feet long — lifted off two private lunar landers from Cape Canaveral on January 15, 2025. It completed its mission to the moon by deploying Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost and iSpace's Resilience. Resilience crashed into the moon and broke apart, but Blue Ghost successfully landed on it, the first private spacecraft to do so.

The Moon is the new main destination in space, and NASA envisions a "stampede" of robotic spacecraft over the next few years to form the basis for a sustainable base on the Moon. Elon Musk's SpaceX and Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin will provide "lunar landers" for NASA's Artemis program astronauts who will go there in the coming years.

Musk's Starship is making progress in test flights from Texas, and Bezos' Blue Moon lander has yet to make a test launch. One or both of those "landers" will participate in the next Artemis III, a test docking in Earth orbit. The landing of astronauts on the moon - the first of NASA's Apollo missions - could come as early as 2028.

"There's going to be a lot of congestion near the moon," McDowell said. "And then an impact like this, something falling on the lunar surface that kicks up huge amounts of dust that spreads for hundreds of kilometers around, is not going to be acceptable to anyone," he predicts.